It’s time now for the inevitable year in review post. In 2010 I made a lot of what felt like great strides in my writing career: I was nominated for a Pushcart, I was named a finalist for a couple of writing contests, I was solicited by an agent as well as by a literary journal, and I won Autumn House Press’s Fiction Prize, which resulted in the publication of my first book. If ever there was a year to look back and be proud of my accomplishments, this year was it.

Yet I feel strangely dissatisfied with all of that, and dissatisfied with the work I put in as a writer this year. Most of these accomplishments, it’s important to note, are a result of work I did in previous years. In 2010, although I had some success, I didn’t write anywhere near as much as I have in past years. During much of the year, I was distracted with my career as a teacher or I was working under editorial deadlines for writing projects that didn’t really engage me the way I would have liked.

In some ways, I feel that all the hard work I’ve been putting in the past several years is really starting to pay off, and that’s a nice feeling. It’s nice to know that it wasn’t for naught. At the same time, though, I’m beginning to have some of my dreams come true (I know that’s a cliché, but it’s literally accurate), and the experience is exactly as anticlimactic as many published authors say it is. Signing my first book contract, although exciting at first, didn’t really change my life in any meaningful way. I went from being an author with several published stories that hardly anybody will ever read to an author with a short story collection that hardly anybody will ever read. All the book pub really gets me is a better chance at landing a full time job as an English instructor, and even then, a second book might be necessary.

Let me just say, I’m not taking publishing a book for granted. I’m very lucky that my book is getting published, and I’m lucky that it’s being published by such an excellent small press. I’m lucky that the physical book itself is so astonishingly beautiful and that somebody read what I had written and wanted to pay me money for it.

But even if this book wasn’t getting published, the experience of writing it would still have been worthwhile. I enjoyed writing these stories, and even if nobody were ever to read them but me, my workshop peers and instructors, and my friends and loved ones, it really wouldn’t matter. The experience of writing them gave my life meaning, and I think that’s the reason why the publication of the book itself feels anticlimactic. Because prior to getting the book published, I had already gained something major from having written it, something far more important than the physical book itself.

The whole experience raises the question: what it is that I’m really working towards? I’ve been putting a lot of effort into building my CV and furthering my career as a teacher, and writing has unfortunately become inextricably linked with that in my mind. I have to write, because I have to publish, because I have to try to find a better job. A job that gives me health insurance and a reasonable salary and that I can rely on from one quarter to the next.

I don’t like the idea of writing being part of my work life. I don’t like the publish-or-die mentality of academia, where the question isn’t even what have you published, but what have you published lately; what will you publish next?  I don’t want my writing life to be based on publication; I don’t want to boil it down to notches on my CV. I want to write because it makes life fun, because it’s exciting, getting sucked into another world for a while. I want to write for myself. Publishing what I’ve written is nice, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to have to. I want publishing to be a secondary goal, only once I’ve gotten my own  pleasure from the experience of writing. And I don’t want to let my career interests get in the way of the writing itself.

Which brings me to my goals for 2011. The truth is, this year I just want to be happy. I want to spend as few hours as possible this year being stressed or doing things I don’t want to do. How do I intend to accomplish that? Well, I want to work on my new novel, because I like these characters and want to spend more time in their world, and I’m tired of pushing it off to the side because there are other, more immediately publishable things I “should” be working on. I’d love it if I end up getting sucked into some new stories, too, but you know what I absolutely am not including in my goals? Publication.

Ever since I started getting published, I’ve had at least two things come out a year. The beauty of 2011 is that I already have two things scheduled to come out: my book, and a creative nonfiction essay I was solicited to write. If I go the entire year without publishing anything else, it still won’t feel like a step backwards, so I’m just not going to worry about publishing at all this year. I'll probably still submit things, but only if/when I want to, and I won't write for the purpose of submitting. All I really want right now is to write, not to have written, not to be a Writer, not to have an increasingly more impressive CV. I just want to write because I enjoy writing. None of the rest of it matters, really, at all.